Drawing on interviews and on the actual language that readers (students, teachers, and adults) use to interpret and respond to literary texts, this book examines the conventions that shape talk about literature in large groups, small groups, and adult book clubs. By looking across contexts, the four separate but related studies in the book raise…

As a preamble to the development of a storytelling aesthetic, a study analyzed written reports of recent storytelling events to investigate the claim that little theoretical and critical language regarding storytelling is currently in use. Ninety-six reviews of storytelling performances by 11 different storytellers were examined. Sixty were…

Noting that discussions about the interaction of science and politics are often heard, this paper addresses how these discursive arenas are defined and distinguished. It argues that political and scientific discourse may be distinguished by the roles they assume on the rhetorical stage, and the relevant roles which emerge are implementers and…

In a study published in 1987, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson proposed that an abstract sociolinguistic principle guides and constrains a speaker's choice of language, and that this principle explains the politeness phenomenon in conversation. Moreover, central to this principle is the concept of "face," or personal self-image,…

Deng Xiaopeng's rise to leadership in the People's Republic of China has been accompanied by massive economic and structural reforms. Some claim that these reforms led to the rise of the pro-democracy student movements of 1987 and 1989, and there has been a notable amount of scholarly investigation into their political and economic consequences.…

President Bush's declaration of April 5-7, 1991 as National Days of Thanksgiving is a unique example of Presidential civil religious discourse: no other President has ever made such a declaration to thank God for a victory in war. Whether he intended to or not, President Bush engaged in a rhetorical form which allowed him to manipulate a very…

To better facilitate students' learning how to write with authority, instructors need to look more carefully at what it is they do when they teach composition courses. They must look critically at what they accept as "natural" or "true" about good writing practices. A training session for the graders of the Freshmen Placement…

An analysis of the English lexical items "even" and "only" looks at features of their behavior in discourse and brings attention to certain unexamined aspects of their role in text. Their syntactic behavior is reviewed and some problems with previous interpretations are examined. The features of "even" are defined:…

In the last 6 years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been undergoing fundamental political reinvention. Scholars of language, literacy, and rhetoric can learn much from the study of rhetorical histories. Accordingly, a brief rhetorical history of these upheavals, particularly those in…

This paper addresses the spatiotemporal, discourse and emotional or connotative functions of demonstratives in Aklanon narrative discourse. The demonstrative system of Aklanon in terms of the spatial relation between speaker and hearer is described. Discourse functions of demonstratives (exophoric, endophoric, cataphoric, and anaphoric reference)…

This paper is an analysis of behavioral texts (speech directed obligatorily to a second person in a communication situation) and a discussion of the persuasive devices employed by the speakers in an effort to effect a change in the listener's behavior. This study deals with two Eastern Bontoc behavioral texts. Several nonlinguistic persuasive…

The dialectic of pitting reality against the perception of reality has been a proclivity of philosophers since the days of Plato and Greek civilization. Most philosophers today regard the availability of a pure reality to be impossible. The world is as it appears to be: thinkers have no access to perfect truth. Accordingly, the matter of…

Approaching the study of literacy through the discourse perspective, this paper first considers some of the relations between discourse and social life. The paper then discusses the epistemological, rhetorical, community-maintaining, and ideological functions of discourse through examination of three types of discipline-based discourses, and…

Rhetorical norms of early McCarthyist discourse reveal a reliance upon images of chaos and the body. Through such metaphors, rhetors crafted a model of discussion that feminized "democracy" and "tolerance" to support anti-Communist measures and de-legitimize their opponents. Political variety was coded as deviant to national…

This paper provides a literature review of the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as applied in persuasion. Specifically, the paper addresses distraction with regard to effects on persuasion. In addition, the application of proxemic violations as peripheral cues in message processing is discussed. Finally, the paper proposes to shed new light on…